Panelist Profiles

Hiawatha Bray is a technology writer for the Business section of the Boston Globe. He has contributed to a number of newspapers and magazines including Wired, Fast Company and Black Enterprise. He received an Overseas Press Club award for his series on the Internet in Africa. Before joining the staff of the Boston Globe in 1995, Bray wrote for the Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader and the Detroit Free Press. He was recently named as one of the 10 most influential newspaper journalists covering technology by the editors of Marketing Computers magazine.

Kate Crawford is a writer, composer and academic based in Sydney, Australia. Her most recent book, Adult Themes, won the individual category of the Manning Clark House National Cultural Awards. Kate is an Associate Professor in the newly formed Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on social change and digital cultures, with a particular interest in mobile media. Prior to her life as an academic, she spent a number of years working as a journalist in both Australia and the US, including The Sydney Morning Herald.

Callie Crossley (Moderator) is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker and the host of WGBH's TheCallie Crossley Show. She also offers commentary on the media for “Beat the Press,” National Public Radio, and other outlets. Producer of the Academy Award-nominated hour of the acclaimed documentary series Eyes on the Prize, Callie has won nearly every top film and broadcast journalism prize, including a national Emmy, a Peabody, and an Edward R. Murrow award. A former producer for ABC's “20/20,” she is currently Program Manager for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow.

Chris Csikszentmihályi is Visiting Distinguished Professor of Art and Design Research at Parsons the New School for Design, and Professor of Media Design Matters at Art Center College of Design. He cofounded and served as Director of the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT, where he also founded and directed the Computing Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab. Chris's research explores ways to create unique media technologies for cultural applications, especially systems for social change. He has worked in the intersection of new technologies, media, design and the arts for over a decade.

Virginia Heffernan began writing for The New York Times in 2003 — first as a television critic in the Arts section, then as an Internet columnist at the Sunday Magazine. The co-author (with Mike Albo) of the comic novel The Underminer, she has been an editor at Harper's and Talk magazines, and has written for The New Yorker, Mother Jones and Slate, where she was that magazine's first television critic. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard. Her book, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet, is forthcoming from Free Press.

Mike Klein is co-founder, Chairman and CEO of The Sunlight Foundation which aims to improve the transparency and thus the accountability and performance of the Congress by using information technology to make accessible information about the members of Congress and those who seek to influence them. He is also the Chairman of the Board of CoStar Group, Inc., a public company (CSGP on NASADQ), he co-founded that provides 24/7 Internet access to information about over 70 billion square feet of commercial, retail, industrial and multi-family structures throughout the United States, Great Britain, France and elsewhere.

Charles Kravetz (Moderator) was named General Manager of WBUR-FM in December 2010. Previously, he was the President and General Manager of NECN (New England Cable News) where he oversaw the largest regional news channel in America. Before launching NECN, Kravetz spent 12 years at WCVB-TV. While there, he held several positions including assistant news director, senior executive producer of new programming, original producer and later executive producer of Chronicle, WCVB's award-winning nightly magazine program, associate producer and later producer of Calendar, an Emmy-winning monthly newsmagazine.

Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, and a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and Boston Review. Before moving to the US, Morozov was Director of New Media at Transitions Online, a Prague-based media development NGO active in 29 countries of the former Soviet bloc. Morozov's writings have appeared in TheEconomist, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Washington Post, and many other publications.

Cullen Murphy (Moderator) is Editor-at-Large at Vanity Fair and former Managing Editor of The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of several books including, most recently, Are We Rome? (2007), which compares the politics and culture of Ancient Rome with that of the contemporary United States. A graduate of Amherst College with a degree in Medieval History, he wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant along with his father, John Cullen Murphy, from the mid 70s until 2004. Cullen is a former member of the board of Mass Humanities.

Eli Pariser is the former Executive Director of MoveOn.org, and the organization's current board president. During the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Pariser co-created the Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest and raised over $30 million from small donors to run ads and back Democratic and progressive candidates. Pariser is the author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You in which he explains how search engine queries based on a user's past Internet search history provide liberals and conservatives with entirely different sets of responses – and why this is a problem for our democracy.

Charles SteelFisher is the co-founder and President of Alipes, a Boston-based digital strategy firm whose clients range from Fortune 500 companies to leading politicians to international non-profit organizations. In 2006, he served as the director of new media for Deval Patrick for Governor where he introduced revolutionary online fund raising and organizing systems that helped build the biggest grassroots organization in the history of Massachusetts politics. He was subsequently retained by David Plouffe and Obama for America to coordinate the launch of the 2010 presidential campaign's new media efforts.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a cultural historian and media scholar, and is currently a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. From 1999 through the summer of 2007 he worked in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University. Vaidhyanathan is the author of The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) and a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and Salon.com.Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and author of The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. His research interests include battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, human computing, and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society and the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.